Sometimes a film comes along and downright shocks you, films like Human Centipede *shudders* films like A Serbian Film (so many things wrong with that film) but then a film comes along where you can’t decide whether to stop watching and switch it off or keep watching it and see where it takes you, The House That Jack Built is one of those movies and believe as much as I wanted to switch it off I thought NO!!!! I’m not going too, what followed was possibly the most hardest film I’ve had to sit through, number one was my sisters school choir recital… god forbid I never knew kids could turn the colours of the rainbow in to a two and half hour song about what said colours represent.

What a surprise that said film was directed by none other than the king of depression Lars Von Trier… The House That Jack Built not my sisters choir recital, although I would’ve paid to see that, The House That Jack Built follows Matt Dillon through a twelve year serial killing spree, we see him kill women, men and children.

Yep, you heard me, we actually see him kill children. It doesn’t happen off camera no, we see the bloodiness of it all guts and gore the whole Shabang! And out of all the scenes in that film that’s the one that really kept me awake for days, I’m not gonna go in to detail about it but let’s just say it involves two young boys and a high powered sniper rifle (you can work out the rest) the film itself is utterly disturbing as we see Jack become so obsessed with these killings that it makes you wonder and ponder what’s going to happen next, all while your watching through your fingers, you sit there wondering how is this all going to pan out, is he going to get caught.

I must say for the record that Matt Dillon’s performance is absolutely terrifying, he plays the part of Jack so very well that you kinda forget your watching an actor on screen and more like a Netflix true crime docu-series, the most disturbing part was possibly when Jack forces a Mum to feed her dead son pie and rearranges said son’s face giving him a rather grotesque looking smile, I’m not gonna lie but I did walk out at that very part because you will need a strong stomach to sit through that.

The ending however is possibly one of the greatest twists I think I’ve ever seen, Jack has these conversations with a man called Verge, at the end of the film Verge is revealed to be actually Virgil the great roman poet who wrote Dante’s Divine Comedy, in the poem Virgil guides Dante through Hell and Purgatory, this serves as the ending to The House That Jack Built and its executed very very well, Verge is played very very well by Bruno Ganz, the guy who played Adolf Hitler in the amazing film Downfall.

I’ve never really liked Lars Von Trier but I do believe that this is possibly one of his most ambitiously artistic film I’ve seen, and that’s a rare occasion me completing a Lars Von Trier film, all in all I give The House That Jack Built a fair 7/10 it’s ballsy very very ballsy given the fact that we see kids being murdered, but credit goes to Dillon and Ganz’s acting, these two actors gave a performance worthy of an Oscar (Ganz possibly a posthumous Oscar nod on account of his death earlier this year) any way guys I’ll catch ya later 🙂